Welcome to the second all online edition of Armadillo! We also welcome some new contributors ® Patrick Barry, sixth former son of regular reviewer Anita, and Zizou Corder, who is a combination of Louisa Young and her 12-year-old daughter, Isabel, the authors of the phenomenally successful Lion Boy. Armadillo hopes to carry an interview with them in the next issue, to coincide with the publication of Lion Boy 2: The Chase.
A recent report has found that one in five children can't name a favourite book. That must surely be made up for by the enthusiastic and prolific reading of some of the other four? One e-correspondent of mine told me last month that she had read –104 books so far this year”.
It has been a great joy having a –Contact the author” section on my two websites, however time-consuming it is to reply. It is the enthusiastic readers who take advantage of this and I am now in regular correspondence with several of them ® usually the ones who want to be published writers themselves. Those of you writer/illustrator subscribers who have your own websites, have you any stories to share? (Obviously without giving real names or e-mail addresses).
I have twice now, among fairly large numbers of e-mails, been sent home addresses ® unsolicited, obviously ® by young girls. I have warned them both about the dangers of such trusting behaviour, even in writing to a female favourite author. But in the light of the William Mayne case (see News section), it has made me profoundly uneasy. Has anyone else had this happen to them and is there anything we can do about it?
In this issue, you can read reports of two important meetings held at The Society of Authors. One was about discount selling and the other about Literacy. These are closely linked because, if we are to believe some of the scare stories we read in the papers and trade press, fewer and fewer children are choosing to read as a leisure activity. If skilled and experienced authors are driven out of the business by low returns on their work, children's choices will be reduced. And if they don't catch the spark of reading in school while they are still young, our industry will grind to a halt, sooner rather than later.
~ Mary Hoffman